The appointment of General Foch as head of the General Staff was made on May 15, 1917, while Marshal Joffre was in the United States to confer with our officials regarding our part in the war.  On the same date General Philippe Petain, the heroic defender of Verdun, who had been Chief of Staff for a month, was appointed Commander-in-Chief of all French armies operating on the French front.

General Foch installed himself at the Invalides, and addressed himself to the study of all the allies’ fronts, the assembling American army, and to another task for which he was signally fitted:  that of coordinating the plans and purposes of the Generalissimo and the government.

Wherever General Foch goes, one finds him creating harmony and, through harmony, doubling everyone’s strength.

He “gets on” with everybody, but not in the way that sort of thing is too generally done—­not by methods which have come to be called diplomatic and which involve a great deal of surface affability, of wordy beating about the bush and concealing one’s real purposes from persons who see his hand and wonder if they are bluffing him about theirs.

Foch has no stomach for this sort of thing.  His whole bent is toward discovering the right thing to do and then making it so plain to others that it is the right thing that they adopt it gladly and cooperate in it with ardor.

In council he is still the great teacher striving always not merely to make his principles remembered, but to have them shared.

The eminent French painter, Lucien Jonas, who has served in Artois, at Verdun, on the Somme and in Italy, and has been appointed painter of the Army Museum at Des Invalides, was commissioned to make a picture of General Foch holding an allies’ council of war at Versailles.

It was, of course, impossible for Jonas to be actually present at a council meeting.  But it was arranged that he should sit outside a glass door through which he could see all, but hear nothing.

“General Foch,” he tells us, “held his auditors in a sort of fascination.  One felt that in his explanations there was not a flaw, not a hesitancy.  All seemed clear, plain, irresistible.”

This power was his in great degree in the years before the war.  But now men who listen to him know that his perceptions are not merely logical—­they are workable.  His performances prove the worth of his theories.

On March 21, 1918, Ludendorff launched his great offensive against the British army.  The line bent; it cracked.  Amiens seemed doomed; the British in France were threatened with severance from their allies—­with envelopment!

After four days of onrushing disaster a conference was called to meet at Doullens—­a conference of representatives of the allied governments.  Something must be done to coordinate the various “fronts,” to put them under a supreme command.